The SMA Marketing Blog

What Are LSI Keywords and Why Are They Important

When it comes to creating great content, context is key. The old days of obsessing over a single keyword are long gone. Today, 15% of searches every day are terms that have never been searched before. This means people are finding new and interesting ways to search for common issues. LSI keywords will help boost the contextuality of your content while also improving your search visibility.

What is an LSI Keyword? LSI Keywords are essentially keywords related to the keyword that you search for on search engines such as Google. In short, they are keywords that are related to your main term. They help support your content and give it more context for both the search engines and your users. Learn more in the video below.

Video Transcript:

Hey, everybody, I'm Ryan Shelley, and today we're going to be talking about keywords. But not just any keywords, we're going to be talking about LSI Keywords and why they're essential to your content marketing strategy and search engine optimization. Let's go!

Thanks for joining us today and if you liked our videos in the past and you want to learn more about how to take your marketing the next level hit the subscribe button below. We publish new videos every Monday, and we'd loved to have you be part of our community.

So LSI Keywords. What are they and how do we use them? How do we find them? That is really probably some of the biggest questions you are thinking right now. Let's understand a little bit about what LSI is and what it stands for. It stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. OK, that's not very clear, right? So it's actually a mathematical algorithm that helps understand the contextual connection between words. This is something that Google uses to understand the context of a piece of content and how words are related to one another.

So in the past people used to just use keyword stuffing all the time. If you wanted to rank for a certain term, you would just put that keyword in as many times as you could. As we know, Google figured that out. And they built ways to push back against people who are doing that. But they've also built ways to help understand content more naturally, and that's the real key behind LSI.

It's about understanding when people are talking about a specific category, things mean different things and people search for different words around a specific topic rather than just specific words over and over and over again.

You've probably heard that 15% of searches every day are brand new, terms that have never been searched before. But 75% of the search terms have been searched before. But they have usually been searched for a little differently. They have a search modifier added to them or have a different prefix or suffix.

LSI is helping Google better understand how all of our terms fit together in the grand scheme of things. To really break it down we're talking about keywords that are related to keywords. And when you're talking about using content, LSI keywords are going to be supporting keywords that are supporting your main focus and that core topic you're going after. See, context is key when it comes to online marketing, to SEO or to any conversation you're having even if it's offline marketing. If you're out of context, the message isn't going to make sense. But if you can help build context around the message you can really help engage people without having to repeat the same thing over and over and over again.

So we're going to do a couple of things. I'm going to show you a map, and then we're going to look at a really cool tool that you can use. It’s free online to help you find these keywords. So you have a graph right here in the middle for marketing. Let's say I'm writing a post generically about marketing, now I would probably never really go after that, but say it was for this instance. So some keywords are really long-term keywords, they're supporting and related to marketing as a whole. Like "what is the definition of marketing," "principles of marketing," "marketing strategy" and another one is "marketing ideas," or another is "local search marketing." But also this term down here, web design. Now that would make sense if my piece on marketing was focused a little bit more on the digital sphere. And now web design could actually be contextually appropriate because it has a lot to do with digital marketing and online marketing. So you can understand the relationship between web design and marketing.

All right that's a brief example of doing it on the whiteboard. But now look at the really cool tool online that you can use absolutely free. Let's get into it.

All right so here's this cool little tool it's called LSI Graph. Just type lsigraph.com into your browser, and it's going to bring you to this page, and you can see there's not a lot to it. There doesn't need to be a lot to it because really we're just asking this key generator to help us find some terms.

So let's say you're doing a YouTube video on LSI Keywords. You want to find some contextually appropriate terms around LSI keywords. Type it in here click recapture and generate. So what this tool is going to do, to define, it will show you some LSI terms that you can be used inside your content to help make it more contextually appropriate, more search-friendly and more user-friendly really! So you can see there's a huge list here and you can just start going through these terms and including them, hopefully, to help you build some better content.

I mean the key around it, is not to find as many creative words for a site or whatever keyword you're going for and stuff them in there. The goal is to help you get away from keyword stuffing and having to focus just on one term. It's going to help you become more natural in your content. These tools can help you generate terms. So if you want to go even deeper, it may actually throw up a term that's more appropriate to focus on. So it's a really cool tool. From here you can do some of your own research to see how appropriate the words suggested are and make sure that it's actually contextually appropriate.

Click the button down here. They're going to give you a little bit more content. I got this free e-book which is great, but they also give a little bit more of an explanation around LSI keywords.

So I hope you found this helpful if you guys have any questions on LSI keywords, or if you are new to online marketing, please comment below. We'd love to help you out. And until next time happy marketing.

Share this Article:

Ryan is passionate about helping companies make a more personal connection online with their customers and prospects. He is a regular contributor to Search Engine Land, the largest and most popular SEO news site on the web. His works has also been featured on the HubSpot Blog, Business2Community and by LinkedIn Marketing solutions.